Fewer Men Enroll in Colleges and Universities: Why Our Educational Institutions Don’t Work for Boys

During the last decade or two, a troubling trend has manifested itself at American institutions of higher learning. Uniformly, more girls than boys matriculate and graduate. More girls are applying to college, more girls are being admitted to college, and among the students at college, more girls than boys succeed in reaching graduation, and girls have higher average grades than boys.

There is a serious gender gap here.

The generalizations above can be seen in, and confirmed by, reams of statistics. Not only does this gap exist, but it is also growing larger.

In September 2021, Douglas Belkin wrote an article titled “A Generation of American Men Give Up on College.” In that article, he concluded that “The number of men enrolled at two- and four-year colleges has fallen behind women by record levels, in a widening education gap across the U.S.”

The obvious questions are: What causes this pattern? What can be done to correct it?

It is likely that there is more than one cause for this gender gap: It is probably a multifactorial phenomenon. One of the causes may be societal and cultural attitudes about boys and masculinity. Another cause may be the structure and habits of the system of secondary education: high school.

In 2021, Belkin wrote:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. By 2024, those numbers had amplified the gap: women were more than 60%, and men were less than 40% of the incoming freshman class. During the years at college, more boys than girls dropped out, increasing the gap at commencement ceremonies even further.

This gap held consistently against other variables like race, income level, ethnicity, religion, etc.

This gap was a long time in the making, as Belkin’s 2021 article reported:

This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Indeed, by 2024, the graduation rate for men was still lower, and falling.

Coherent efforts to rectify this trend are rare, but some reasonable attempts have been made to matriculate more boys than girls, as Douglas Belkin explains:

At Baylor University, where the undergraduate student body is 60% female, the admission rate for men last year was 7 percentage points higher than for women. Every student has to meet Baylor’s admission standards to earn admission, said Jessica King Gereghty, the school’s assistant vice president of enrollment strategy and innovation. Classes, however, are shaped to balance several variables, including gender, she said.

At Baylor, which was trying for some form of gender equity already in Belkin’s 2021 article, there was still a significant gender gap.

The experiences of the admissions officers at Baylor shed some light on data which would apply to nearly all colleges and universities. One factor was the application process itself.

College applications require attention to detail, and that is a skill which is less common among twenty-first century boys than among twentieth-century boys, as Belkin explains:

Ms. Gereghty said she found that girls more closely attended to their college applications than boys, for instance making sure transcripts are delivered. Baylor created a “males and moms communication campaign” a few years ago to keep high-school boys on track, she said.

Given the ubiquity of the problem and the various causes of it, what’s to be done?

Any effective solution would need to be thoroughly and consistently applied across the secondary educational system. High schools, which are four years in most places but three years in some, might reshape themselves along these lines:

• More structure
• More discipline
• More competition
• More rigor
• More physicality

Boys thrive in structure, even when — perhaps especially when — they bump up against the boundaries of that structure and find them intact. In a consistently structured environment, boys know the rules of the process, and know that there is a consequence to not following those rules. Boys are drawn to video games and computer games because the machine applies the rules with ruthless reliability. By contrast, many schools currently operate with “soft” rules, leaving boys to wonder which, if any, of the rules are real. One older high school student was kindly helping a new freshman to understand the school; he pointed to a list of rules in the student handbook, and said, “I can tell you which of these rules are actually enforced.”

Discipline has become a politically incorrect concept in many current American high schools, but this does a disservice to boys. Boys need to know what the boundaries are, and what the consequences for violating those boundaries are. Psychologist Carol Gilligan authored a book titled In a Different Voice in which she argued that boys conceptualize interaction in terms of systems and rules, whereas girls conceptualize interaction in terms of relationships and mutual care. One need not accept all of Gilligan’s hypotheses in order to see the relevance of her insights.

Competition is a key motivator for boys. Some high schools have stopped publishing a “rank in class” statistic for graduates. Some boys excel in competitions, e.g., for playing musical instruments or academic games, but fail to put forth effort in classroom situations which contain little competition.

Boys and girls are both aware if they are receiving meaningful academic content, or if they are receiving fluff. If an assignment is to write about how a poem might make the reader feel, and if it is therefore perceived as less rigorous, boys are inclined to devote less effort to it. Girls will also perceive the assignment as less rigorous, but are more likely to comply and give effort to it. By contrast, when the assignment for the same poem is to count the number of syllables per line, and see if there is a mathematical pattern present, boys are more likely to engage, seeing the assignment as a mental challenge. Rigor is a skill needed in order to successfully complete the college application process.

Boys and girls both benefit from physical fitness. At the secondary level, that can take different forms. Outside the United States, some high schools have a fifteen- or twenty-minute exercise program for all students every morning. Requiring more physical education (“gym”) classes is also an option. The solution could even be as simple as encouraging students who live near the school to walk instead of drive to school. The existence of high school athletic teams and programs muddies the perception on this question. Most students are never a part of a high school athletic team or program during their four years.

These are merely a few preliminary ideas which will require much more examination and refinement. But nothing will change if no action is taken. In Belkin’s 2021 article, he states:

​​Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

By 2024, things had only gotten worse.

Hope is to be found: increasingly, high school administrators, college administrators, and parents are seeing the systematic disadvantages confronting boys. A century or two ago, Americans worked to make education available to women. Now they work to make it available to men.